ROBERT GLASPER EXPERIMENT at the Horseshoe, Tuesday, June 25. Rating: NNNN
Opening his Horseshoe set with a promise to “play some deep shit,” Robert Glasper wasted little time before busting out the experimental jazz he’s famous for. Amidst thick humidity in a packed house of hipsters next to business types behind teens beside old-school jazz heads, the Robert Glasper Experiment – Glasper, a sax player, drummer and bassist – delivered a two-hour show that spanned every musical genre imaginable.
While the very mention of his Grammy-winning Black Radio album made the crowd collectively swoon, the real highlights of the night were the covers. With the aid of a vocoder, Glasper and co. recreated the recent (Daft Punk’s Get Lucky), classic (Sade) and nostalgic (Nirvana). There was an awed hush followed by appreciative love for Kanye and Jay-Z’s No Church In The Wild – it felt both religious and rebellious. How to top that? An audience singalong to Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time during the encore, natch.
Holly Mackenzie
J. COLE at 99 Sudbury, Wednesday, June 26. Rating: NNN
For J. Cole’s Dollar & A Dream tour, he visited 10 North American cities, played teeny venues, announced locations day-of and charged $1 for entry. His last stop was Toronto, and getting in was a clusterfuck of police and frustrated fans. Some 5,000 showed up, some 500 got in.
Because he’s properly stadium-touring his new album, Born Sinner, in a couple of months, Cole was able to perform lesser-known jams from his mixtapes like Simba, Before I’m Gone and The Girl Of My Dreams. Don’t expect to hear songs from the radio, he told us. He also said he wasn’t going to do anything from Born Sinner. Thankfully, he fibbed, and performed Forbidden Fruit and Crooked Smile toward the end.
Much of the show was by request from the audience, and if Cole hadn’t performed it in years, he improvised or called someone onstage to rap in the blanks. He sat for some songs, which was odd. Maybe it was the 50C heat inside the joint. His energy was high, though, and when it was done he stepped into the crowd and glad-handed for at least 10 minutes.
Julia LeConte
MICHAEL RAULT at Corus Entertainment (25 Dockside), Thursday, June 27. Rating: NNN
Open Roof Festival has a great concept: bringing musicians and movie types together for summer evenings that begin with a musical performance and end with a film – all outside, in plain view of Toronto’s postcard-perfect nighttime skyline.
Unfortunately, weather moved this week’s event, which featured Toronto-via-Edmonton rocker Michael Rault, from the Moonview Lot – a parking lot near George Brown’s new waterfront campus – indoors to Corus Entertainment, which, unfortunately, made for echoey sound.
Rault and his band’s poppy three-minute love songs owe a lot to classic rock, the Kinks and 50s doo-wop. It was a weird venue for the band, whom I’d rather see in a sweaty rock ‘n’ roll bar. But their tunes had a catchy, nostalgic and sophisticated groove to them, and Rault, who played almost the entire set with his hair in his eyes, proved a strong lead guitarist as well as a shyly charismatic front man.
Open Roof Festival continues weekly until August 22.
Sarah Greene
DIGITAL DREAMS at the Flats at Molson Amphitheatre (909 Lake Shore), Saturday and Sunday, June 29 and 30. Rating: NNNN
The Flats at Molson Amphitheatre felt a world away from the concrete jungle during Digital Dreams. EDM heads had their choice of three stages – a tented House of Boom and two spacious open-air venues: the Echo Beach and Dreams stages.
The hard part was deciding which acts to catch, as all three stages had a steady stream of performers. On Saturday, Bob Sinclair played Love Generation (he didn’t the last time I saw him) for a joyous few minutes that buoyed the crowd on a peaceful high, before Paul Van Dyk and Porter Robinson closed out to a dedicated, bouncing mob.
The Sunday lineup had even more firepower. Flosstradamus had trap fiends enraptured in the House of Boom rapper Waka Flocka Flame randomly showed up with T-rex and did a MuchMusic interview onstage Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike popped champagne Wolfgang Gartner and Tiësto closed out the Dreams stage, while club vets Steve Lawler and Dubfire had the final slots at Echo Beach.
Bouncing back and forth doesn’t give you the best perspective on any one set, but all spaces were rammed, the crowds euphoric and, really, it was all just a warm-up for the after-parties that went on elsewhere until 6 am.
Julia LeConte
YEAH YEAH YEAHS at Echo Beach (909 Lake Shore West), Monday, July 1. Rating: NNNNN
There’s no one quite like Karen Orzolek. The lead singer of New York indie rock mainstays the Yeah Yeah Yeahs has been captivating audiences since 2000 with her mix of scrappy shrieking, heart-on-sleeve ballads, live theatrics and bedazzled costumes only she could pull off.
Touring in support of their latest album, Mosquito, the trio packed Echo Beach and proved that drummer Brian Chase, guitarist/keyboardist Nick Zinner and Karen O are far from mid-life band crisis territory. Karen O bounded onstage in a white tasselled blazer and white sequined capris, completely in control yet exuding emotional vulnerability and raw sexuality (at one point she unzipped her pants and shoved her microphone down them) – sometimes in the span of one song.
The set list was perfectly culled from across their discography, including fan favourites Gold Lion, Heads Will Roll and Maps (dedicated to “all you lovers out there”). While the new record has received mixed reviews, gospel-influenced Sacrilege and percussion-sparse Subway sounded even better live – the former anchored by Zinner’s guitar mastery.
Max Mertens
